Josiah watched a white-faced calf push in against its mother, both wearing Ben Rawlins' future, altered by a hot iron into Colonel Voss's property. Below him the stolen herd shifted and lowed, alive and entire, and utterly lost so long as it stayed hidden in a place no map admitted to. He thought of Clara rising from her fever to an empty pasture. He thought of Pearl holding a basin in the dark.
"Two nights, then," he said. "We learn their schedule, and we bring Ben, and we do not come back down this wash without his cattle." Behind them, unseen in the slot's shadow, a loose stone ticked down from the rim and fell, small and sharp in the silence — and all three of them, turning as one, understood that the canyon might already know it had been found.
Chapter 16
: Proof in the Brand
They worked in the thin shade at the mouth of Box Canyon while the heat stood white above the riverbed, and no one spoke louder than the wind allowed. Below them the stolen cattle shifted and lowed in the narrow pasture Voss's men had fenced with cut mesquite, dust rising from their hooves in a slow veil. Josiah lay on his belly at the rim with his field glass, counting again.
"Forty-one head," he said. "Same as yesterday. They have not moved them."
Aiyana knelt beside him with a flat piece of slate and a stub of charcoal wrapped in cloth. She did not need the glass. Her eyes followed the animals the way other people followed print, reading the brands at a distance Josiah could barely make out even magnified. When a steer turned its flank to the sun, she marked the slate in quick, certain strokes.
Delgado worked lower down, in the arroyo where two dead steers lay half buried in silt — animals that had sickened, been dragged out of the canyon, and left for the coyotes. It was ugly work in the heat, and necessary. With his skinning knife he loosened the branded patch from one carcass, careful to take it whole, while the smell rose thick and rotten around him.
A fresh brand could be laid over an old one with a running iron, and any cowman knew it, but knowing and proving were different countries. On the living steers the Rawlins mark had been worked into Voss's bar-circle with strokes so neat they might have fooled a buyer in a hurry. On the dead steer's hide, though, the truth sat plainer. Delgado held the patch up to the light, and beneath the new scar the old hair grew back a different color, pale against the dark, tracing letters no iron could argue with.
"There," Aiyana said quietly. "R-A-W. You can see it when the sun is through it."
Josiah took the hide and turned it in his hands. The leather was stiffening already. He thought of Rawlins, who had buried a son that winter and come near to losing everything else to men who wanted a war to hide a theft behind. He thought of the talk in Cienega Wells, growing hotter each day, of rifles cleaned on porches and boys rehearsing the ride they meant to take against Nahlin's people.
"If we ride in with this and say it, half the town will call it a trick," Delgado said, wiping his hands on the dust itself, there being nothing cleaner. "They want it to be Apache. A war gives them leave to take the valley and call it justice."
"Then we do not give them a saying," Aiyana replied. "We give them a thing they must hold in their own hands."
So they made their evidence the way careful people make anything that must bear weight. Aiyana drew each altered brand on slate, then again on paper Josiah carried folded in his shirt, marking which steer bore which mark and where it stood in the herd. Delgado cut the second hide patch free and salted both from the small pouch he kept for meat, so the flesh side would not spoil before they could show it. Josiah paced the distance from the canyon mouth to the guard's fire ring and drove a whittled stake where the tracks of shod horses crossed the unshod prints that had been planted to tell a lying story — moccasin marks pressed too deep, made by boots wrapped in cloth, all the toes pointing the same wrong way.
It was slow, patient labor, and the sun punished them for it, but Josiah felt steadier than he had in weeks. Grief had taught him how a man could endure a thing without ever touching it. This was different. This had edges and weight.
Late in the afternoon a guard below laughed at something and led his horse down to the seep, passing within sixty yards of where they lay, and all three went still as stones until man and horse had gone again. Aiyana's hand rested near Josiah's wrist — not touching, only near — and he understood it for what it was: a reminder to breathe.
When the light began to fail they wrapped the salted hides in canvas, tied the papers inside Josiah's shirt against his skin, and rubbed out their own sign at the rim with a branch of creosote.